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Reaching for the Transcendent
| Article
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17368 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
2,925 Words |
| Author
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Robert R. Reilly
Robert R. Reilly's second part of his article on English music
appears in the August 1990 issue of The World & I. |
A good deal of twentieth-century "music" is experimental sound that has escaped from the laboratory. Some of it is viral, against which there has seemed no hope of cure. Some of it has served the homeopathic purpose of immunizing audiences from further contact with modern music; its doses are given during concerts at which the listener is virtually trapped into taking his bitter medicine between two sweeter, more traditional musical confections. I have been inclined to think of modern music as a form of punishment therapy ever since Charles Ives scolded a listener who was hissing at a modern-music performance: "When you hear music like this, why don't you sit up and take it like a man?" Werner Erhard could not have said it better. However, this has changed.
There has been a revolution in modern American music over the past decade. Like most revolutions it has caused a mess. Composers began writing whatever came into their heads. In the early 1980s, someone at Nonesuch Records had the ironic sense of humor to commission seventeen American composers to write waltzes. Nothing could seem further from the spirit of our age than the waltz, but the resulting Waltz Project provided the opportunity to hear, in miniature, the full wrenching range of modern compositional techniques, from John Cage's nonsensical sounds of subway noises, Milton Babbitt's blurps and blips, and Philip Glass' minimalism, to Lou Harrison's beautifully melodious waltz-lullaby.
In other words, anything was possible. The wild heterogeneity of styles devoted to the same form, may have been dismaying as a reflection of our ruptured culture, but it was also encouraging in its broad freedom of creativity. The clear message from the 1980s is that the stranglehold hegemony
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